Seeing working mothers juggling between children and the kitchen and young professionals surviving on a junk diet prompted entrepreneur Raghav Gupta to build robot chefs to put home cooking on autopilot.
Posha, the company he co-founded, makes countertop kitchen robots that cook your meals. It recently raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel with participation from existing investors such as Xeed Ventures, Waterbridge Ventures, Binny Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, and others.
“Seeing working mothers juggling between kids and the kitchen or young professionals surviving on an unhealthy junk diet of takeouts and food delivery led to the idea of a cooking robot,” says Gupta, Co-founder, Posha.
Posha, which means nourishing in Sanskrit, can cook one-pot meals from paneer makhani and pad thai to 500 different recipes of various cuisines for up to four people at a time. It has an induction cooktop with a removable pan that comes with a stirrup and three different kinds of spatulas-noodle, curry and a flipping spatula.
“You can search and/or choose a recipe on the Posha screen, put in freshly chopped and other ingredients in the ingredient containers, tap cook and out comes a delicious meal,” says Gupta, while making spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms on the Posha robot.
There are different containers for ingredients, including two for oil and water and a spices rack that can hold and add up to six different spices in a recipe. The robot’s several sensors, including a camera, allow you to observe the food being cooked from your phone screen via the Posha App.
“New recipes are added weekly and are grouped by time of day and other criteria. The robot is context aware, not just about time for meal suggestions, but also by cuisine or dietary preferences and categories like dessert, pasta, soup, etc. If I cook a lot of Filipino food, it will show me those recipes,” says Gupta.
The device that uses computer vision and AI collects intelligence via usage and cooking history. “It knows what you cook. In my case, it’s showing me a lot of vegetarian dishes because I’m a vegetarian. I get suggestions not only for Indian recipes, but also for pastas and mashed potatoes, because those are what I have previously searched and cooked.”
Besides searching for a recipe by name, you can also use the robot to search by pantry-meaning if you have mushrooms and peas, the robot will list recipes that you can cook with those ingredients. The listing starts with the ones that you can cook most easily using the fewest ingredients, followed by more options and rising in complexity.
“Posha asks me how many people I want to cook for. When I don’t want a simplified recipe with fewer optional ingredients, I can uncheck the simplify option and choose to customise to cook to my liking. It also allows me to select the spice levels- for example, hot, medium and less salt and/or oil,” tells Gupta. “Besides the basics, Posha allows various customisations, for example, you can select if you want the pasta being cooked to be al dente (firm).”
From robotic arm to kitchen robot
Formerly known as Nymble, the current product originally started out as a robotic arm, but the learnings at the Bosch’s accelerator programme prompted the founders to change course. They also learned that consumers didn’t want something that moved around their kitchen or that would be hard to clean. “We have been super focused and obsessed with customers from day one. We don’t use Freshdesk or Zendesk to chat with them. We have WhatsApp conversations with over 150 of our customers. I moved to the Bay Area in the middle of the pandemic, just to be close to my customers.”
“We’re working on an integration where you’ll be able to order the groceries automatically. We were in private beta around December last year. Most of our customers are based in the Bay Area,” says Gupta.
With AI models more stable and having developed a support infrastructure outside of the Bay Area, they are expanding to other parts of the US. “We’re currently primarily focused on the US market as the problem is also more acute in this part of the world, because cost of services is super expensive. The intention is to continue to make a very lovable product that people continue to use,” says Gupta.
Gupta grew up in Jangpura in New Delhi and spent four years in Bangalore from 2017 to 21 before moving to the US. “We have a few thousand customers on the waitlist and we are sold out for this year. We’ll continue to ship to those customers and we are taking new orders on our site,” says Gupta. The robot price was recently dropped from $1,750 to $1,500.
Currently, the machine is being manufactured in China, but the founders are looking to diversify their supply chain. “We have a supply constraint right now and the political situation with tariffs is not helping. We are trying to ship as fast as we can,” Gupta noted.“There is no concrete plan that we can make right now because of the ongoing volatility in the market. Every time you make a plan, the chances are that some bill gets stuck with some country. We are really playing the wait and watch game.”
Customer feedback crucial
Feedback from customers has also taught Posha founders that the quality of food reigns supreme and convenience cannot replace the taste and quality parameters when you are in the food business. “Listening to our customer feedback, we have got our recipe ratings up to roughly 4.6— at par with DoorDash. People continue to request for more recipes and a lot of customisation abilities with the recipes,” Gupta pointed out.
On the hardware side, the customer requests are not too many as the founders adopted many initial requests like the machine size to fit under kitchen cabinets; machine and motor reliability; a larger pot size for cooking, dishwasher ease and safety of all containers and a design that can handle spillages with ease.